He Will Not Start Anything on a Monday

There is a half made chair in the workshop and it has been half made since the spring of the year before last.

He can tell you exactly what is left to do on it. Two hours, maybe three. The parts are there. It is not that he has forgotten it.

And he has started nothing else since. Not one thing. He goes out to the workshop, which he still calls the workshop, and he tidies it, and he sharpens things, and he comes back in.

He is fifty-seven. There is a reason and it goes back further than the chair. Twice in his life a thing he was in the middle of got taken away by something that had nothing to do with him: once a job and once a house, and both times he was halfway through building something that then had nowhere to go and no meaning left in it. He is not dramatic about this and would be embarrassed by this paragraph.

What he says, and it is a joke and it is not a joke, is that he will not start anything on a Monday, because he does not know what the week is going to do.

Anybody who has stopped beginning things knows exactly this. And I want to say at the start: no system. No plan for getting back into it. A man who has stopped starting does not need a program, because a program is the largest possible thing to start.

Today has enough of its own

Let me put down a line and look at the job description it hands out.

Take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.Matthew 6:34

The morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Tomorrow is described as having its own responsibilities, which are not a person's to carry today. And then the last line, which is one of the most practical sentences in the whole of the Gospels: sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.

Sufficient. Meaning today has enough of its own, so a person who is also carrying tomorrow's is carrying two days at once and will not be able to move.

That is precisely what a man does when he refuses to begin. He is standing in Monday holding the whole of the week, including the version of the week where everything gets taken away again, and no wonder he cannot pick up a tool.

You are given a today that has enough of its own, and tomorrow was assigned its own responsibilities in that same verse. That is not a soft word for a man with a half made chair. It is what is written in Matthew 6, and it is His Spirit who takes a written line and puts it into a workshop in the afternoon. The week is unpredictable. The instruction is to work in one day.

And I want to be careful with that verse, because it is often used to tell people not to plan, and Jesus is not saying that. He is saying do not carry it. Those are different, and the whole passage is about the carrying rather than the planning.

You have permission to work in a day rather than in a week, and it comes from the verse rather than from anybody being lenient with you. Matthew 6:34 is where that is written, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes an old sentence land in a man with sawdust in the light.

The two things that got taken

Now the tender part, and it goes ahead of anything practical.

What happened to him twice was real. A thing half built that lost its meaning while he was still holding the tools is a specific kind of loss, and the fact that he does not talk about it does not mean it is not sitting in the workshop with him.

And it produced a completely rational response. If beginning something led twice to a half finished object with nowhere to go, then not beginning is a reasonable policy, and it has been running for two years without a vote.

I am not going to scold him for it or tell him to be braver. And I am not going to promise him that nothing gets taken away again, because I have no idea, and nobody honest does.

He that observeth the wind shall not sow; and he that regardeth the clouds shall not reap.Ecclesiastes 11:4

Ecclesiastes is not being harsh there. It is describing, with some sympathy, what happens to a person who waits for conditions: the sowing does not happen, and the sowing was the part that was actually his.

You were given the sowing and never the weather, and two lost things did not transfer the weather onto you. Ecclesiastes 11:4 is the written word for it, and His Spirit is the one who separates a man's part from the part that was never his.

You are held right now, in this workshop, with a chair that has been half made for two years. It is written that sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof, and it is the Spirit who makes that true in a man who will not start anything on a Monday.

If any of this ever turns dangerous, and staying safe genuinely comes into question, call or text a crisis line where you live, 988 in the United States, and tell a doctor or a counselor plainly about the two years and about the tidying. A man who has stopped beginning things is worth a real conversation with a real person, and being held by God has never been a reason to skip it.